Ubi send word that their free online dungeon-crawling hack ‘n slash,The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot, will open up for a week for everyone, not just beta folks, from yesterday until 3rd September. You can jump right in just here, or you can watch a video of a comedy mage with a terrible squeaky mage, below.

The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot is an interesting idea – build up a fortress, invade other people’s increasingly luxurious castles in the sky, and so on – but it’s never been shy about putting microtransactions front-and-center. It was only recently, however, that players rather definitively decided that Ubisoft had taken its mighty quest for players’ loot too far. In a nutshell, the dev/pub powerhouse added the ability to purchase anything regardless of level (so long as it could also be snatched up with in-game currency), and players immediately took to burning pay-to-win banners and mounting the heads of piggy banks on stakes. Ubisoft, to its credit, has admitted that it made a boo-boo.

Gosh, Ubisoft likes releasing trailers. Here’s the seventy-ninety-billionth for The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot – the irony-rich game that will walk a tightrope over the precipice of free-to-play. As ever for this game, the trailer is extremely well made, and a little over-confident.

I can see where this going. The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot is going to bludgeon us into submission with a series of amusing trailery missives, until we feel obliged to try it out. It’s is F2P, after all. But actually this latest trailer – the archer – shows a lot more of the game in-play than I’d expected. And it actually looks okay. At least as okay as Craig’s hands-on suggested it might be.

We had Craig wipe his grubby hands all over The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot last week, and he came away feeling rather positive. So that’s good. But what does it look like when all the screenshots come rapidly, one after the other, in some sort of “moving picture”. We have the technology.

When I first caught sight of The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot at Ubisoft’s recent press event, I feared the worst. From a distance, there didn’t seem to be anything to set it apart and, being free to play, I expected it to be a lesser version of the things it so obviously emulated. ‘So obviously’, in fact, that my first impressions were almost entirely wrong. Here, then, are my second, third and fourth impressions as well.

We’ve currently smuggled Adam out of the country to investigate all things new, French and Ubisoft, but to scoop him ourselves, they’ve just announced The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot. It is, and this is one to get your head around, a free-to-play asynchronous dungeon crawler/tower defence. And it has a brilliant name. There’s an announcement trailer below. It is very silly.